Mysterious rumblings

Apparently there's an uproar among mystery writers/reviewers/publishers about an Edgar-award judge who broke the bonds of confidentiality on a mystery listserv to protest this year's paperback winner, The Confession by Dominick Stansberry. The dissenting judge found the winner abhorrent.

"What constricts my stomach is the concept that fantasies about raping and strangling women are what get rewarded in our field." The other commitee members said they understood my feelings, but believed *The Confession* to be so very well-written that it deserved the Edgar in any case. Yes, the word-smithing was very good. But at least 12 other PBOs we received were written as well, plus had *real* plots with a mystery, twists and turns, a denouement and closure. Not just "I killed her, then I killed her, then I killed her, then I killed her..."

...

One member believed it took "courage" for the author to write about "a character who would not be sympathetic". I replied that in a world where men kill their wives and girlfriends every day, and countless others would like to, I wouldn't call writing about someone who gets away with it to be an act of "courage", but rather pandering to the basest instincts.

There followed posts about the "courage" of said judge and one poster who called for the book to be banned and claimed that he had taken a match to his own copy.

Naturally a backlash ensued: "Horrified" reactions to BOOK BURNING, accusations that the judge was only criticizing the book to get a higher profile for her own (not A-list work), as well as comparisons to Dostoyevsky and In Cold Blood. And of course the requisite jabs at the theocrats in power.

I think this kind of brouhaha ... is going to be increasingly common, partly because the moral landscape is more in flux than it has been for some time ... partly because America is involved in a moral conflict with itself that's quite alien to those of us on this side of the pond. As Europe, which has no legally enshrined tradition of free speech, becomes more libetarian in regard to unpopular or unpalatable art, so America, which has free speech as a central pillar of its constitution, seems to be flirting with repression (and I fully accept in advance that this is by no means true of all Americans, but is certainly true of a powerful conservative rump).

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This kind of ruckus always seems to me to relate to a confusion about the difference between glorification and depiction.

My best theory--probably not a good one--is that some people raised on the Bible can't see books in any other way.

Allow me to add my two cents. First off, nobody's BURNING BOOKS and nobody is going to arrest anyone for either writing the book or defiantly condemning it. Lighten up on the rhetoric people.

I haven't read, and probably won't read, the book because I really don't like gorefests. Also, if I want to read about unredeemed evil, I'll stick to the news. The mass graves being uncovered in Iraq and the shenanigans of Saddam's psychotic son only reinforce my belief in the depravity of man.

And, really, I find comparisons to Dostoyevsky ridiculous. The murder scene in Crime and Punishment was grisly, made even more so by Raskolikov's motive and rationalization for the crime: He killed the pawnbroker for pecuniary reasons and then dressed it up in the rationalization that he was ridding the world of a parasite. Kinda like what Lenin, Stalin and Mao did. But the real theme of the story is redemption. When he admits to the crime, and accepts his punishment, Raskolnikov is redeemed.

Now that we've got that out of the way, I can't help feeling that the dissenting judge has a point. At the very least such books lower the tone. In "Raffles and Miss Blandish" George Orwell compared the "cesspool" that is No Orchids for Miss Blandish to the early stories of Raffles the gentleman burglar and "the immense difference in moral atmosphere between the two books, and the change in the popular attitude that this probably implies."

Like The Confession, which mystery readers defend as well-written, "[No Orchids] is not, as one might expect, the product of an illiterate hack, but a brilliant piece of writing, with hardly a wasted word or a jarring note anywhere." But he was dismayed that popular fiction was "not, as in the old-style crime story, simply escaping from dull reality into an imaginary world of action. One's escape is essentially into cruelty and sexual perversion."

I suspect he'd be equally horrified today.

Submitted to Outside the Beltway's traffic jam.